Linked from Geeks are Sexy, this is some serious eye candy. Feels very remineniscent of Final Fantasy 7.

“Made by Dos Santos Nelson and Meradi Omar at ATI for their master’s degrees, Magnus is a full CG movie telling the tale of an old train which travels through landscapes to get to an ancient city. Enjoy!”

We can only hope they don’t screw this one up as they did with #2 in the series. From the trailer, it seems to be a lot more conspiratorial in nature which is which was really the first games strength. It was plausible, even if far out there.

Someone sent me a nice link to some mapping software earlier today, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or experience with it. The companies name is ProFantasy and they have an entire product line.

The flagship program is called “Campaign Cartographer 3” and seems to be about the best put together piece I’ve seen so far for the purpose. It’s available digitally and you can get the physical product as well if you prefer although it will cost you a little extra money.

Thoughts at a glance
Heavy Duty software
Entire selective suite of software
Priced for it’s capabilities (meaning expensive for more than 1)
Very good looking maps with a variety of products
Modular, with most building off the main software
campaign cartographer)

Looking around at AoM (as I have been remiss in doing my reading lately,) they have a spectacular gallery of 22 re-uses for Altoids tins, giving you yet another reason to purchase them aside from tasty mints. Of particular geeky interest are the electronics lab, dart gun, pinhole camera and finally… the pocket games chest.

The chest is an compact piece of brilliance by Airshipthat apparently has 57 different usable games within its case. Mini cards, some graph paper, dice, chips, and so on so forth. A pretty good way of working it, all in all.

The real question of course is, how good of a job can we do at putting a proper RPG into an Altoids tin? The best solution would be to use the tin to hold the dice and all of the standard paper goodies, and use a smart phone or some reader to hold the instructions proper. But that eats up valuable battery power, which could be pretty bad if you’re stuck in in an airport or out on a camping trip. So I think some micro printing, or better yet a good condensation of rules is the best bet. Any thoughts?

I like having somewhat detailed characters within my games. At least, starting with a little bit of details. Background, family, connections, training and schooling, so on and so forth. It doesn’t have to be incredibly long, but a couple of paragraphs works wonders in establishing some connection between the character and the player as well as making the involved.

Modern characters though, can take some serious time to put together, particular if you are thinking of doing anything over the equivalent of a level 1 character. There is perks, feats, disadvantages and flaws and an entire other number of considerations that go into a character that can make them take some serious time in getting together. As opposed to say, a an old school basic D&D character which you can put together in 5 or 10 minutes and get rolling.

Now of course, the downsides to being long and my thoughts… Are we establishing a destiny for the character in the process? Is it simply assumed that this character is going to be great or at least worth something simply because the time spent in the character creation?

The older characters you could simply crush without too much remorse and it would be a fast re roll to the them up to speed as the character concept is finished. The characters had no real expectations of surviving (particularly at level 1) just as it might be in say actual combat for us standard mortals.

Newer characters of course, you have some pause. Simply because of all the time invested, that you don’t pick them off on a casual basis. Of course, maybe that’s just myself. What are your thoughts on the matter?

This Christmas I made the switch over to a straight razor from the standard off the shelf disposables and in a word it’s simply awesome. There is some therapeutic value in the morning, my face feels a lot better, the shave is much closer to the skin and I find I nick myself less with the straight than the disposables. There are some downsides of course – a learning curve, a higher initial investment and it takes a little bit more time. Even if you don’t feel like taking the plunge of holding a 3 inch razor against your neck; there are some partial steps that will yield much better results than the standard disposable and canned crud for shaving cream.
On the basic level you need a few things, a razor, strop, brush and shaving soap or cream (again, not the canned stuff.) The overall cost is somewhere around 100 dollars for a halfway decent setup, although I would imagine you could do better if you were avid with eBay and craigslist. Likewise, it’s possibly to spend exponentially more on lavishly embellished hardware and exotic material. Fortunately, such items are hardly needed. There are a number of other incidentals that are useful to pick up eventually.. hones, stands and the like.

The number one improvement would probably be jumping over to a badger brush and shave soap. The brush is approximately 50+, to around 100 if you get the good silvertip badger brushes. Soap is around 15+, but it lasts for a year or 2 typically. The more pricey brushes retain water better producing a better lather, not mention being silky soft to the touch. Typically you would soak one for about 5 minutes in warm water, which costs no time if you’re doing this while showering. From there, you shake the excess water off the brush, put it to the soap until it bubbles and then begin lathering up your face or making lather in a bowl. Both have their upsides. In addition to being all natural and nourishing the skin, shaving soap is an excellent lubricant for the razor that’s about to be gliding along the skin. (Modern shave cream is designed to have the razor “float” above the skin and retain shaved hair, while softening the hair and skin. It doesn’t lubricate as well as a result.)

As for the razor itself, any well honed straight will do. Since it is something that takes some practice to do without mangling blades (even stropping improperly can mess up the edge), I recommend going with a blade that is professionally honed for a little while anyways. It should be somewhere between 6-8 weeks before it needs to be rehoned, which typically costs somewhere around $15 and postage unless you can find a place to do it locally. Alternatively, if you don’t like the idea of a big metal knife on your throat, the old school double edged safety razors work “almost” as well and are still considerably cheaper than the usual disposable or cartridge routine. Merkur is a good place to start if you are interested in this route. A well sharpened razor however will cut hairs effortlessly, without any tugging or dragging.

A good option when starting is to only shave part of the face, and gradually increase the area shaved as you get the hang of how the razor is used. Too much angle will cut you, too little won’t cut the hairs properly. Somewhere around 30 degrees is a good place to start, and you simply flatten the razor to your face a little if it starts tugging. Typically you would start shaving with the grain, and then switch to a cross grain and then possibly an against the grain cut depending on how smooth of a shave you want. There are plenty of forums that can give better advice about technique than I can, this is merely here to wet your appetite.

The process is definitely more time consuming (although not as much so as you become more and more proficient), but also something of a ritual and quite relaxing once you get into the routine. You’ll also be wide awake before the razor even touches your face, so it’s a good start to the morning. The net results are typically more comfortable and cheaper (and more environmentally friendly to boot) … sometimes the old ways are the best.

]]>http://www.penandthesword.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=9510Mad Max much?http://www.penandthesword.com/blog/?p=971
http://www.penandthesword.com/blog/?p=971#commentsFri, 04 Feb 2011 18:56:10 +0000http://www.penandthesword.com/blog/?p=971Who needs to go to the post apocalyptic future to see how they refine oil when it can be had right here.. right now. In Indonesia apparently to boot. All it really needs is a couple bleached and oil soaked skulls, some towers and barbed wire.. and of course some guards posted carrying AK’s and spears (because there really isn’t that much technology difference between the 2 sadly.) Leather armor or wearing tires is of course optional.

“After concluding that the popular role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (“D&D”) represented a threat to prison security, officials at Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institution took action to eradicate D&D within the prison’s wall.”

Go ahead, read the link at Geeks if you don’t want to read the entire brief, then come back here and comment!
I have to admit, I have mixed feelings over this. For starters, I am of the belief that hard time in prisons is supposed to be well.. hard time. This is further complicated by the fact in addition to punishment (the entire purpose of going there), it would be nice if the system had some rehabilitative function as well (Which.. is arguably not.) You can further complicate this by the fact that a lot of people are imprisoned for some really inane bullshit. The average American commits an average of 3 felonies a day due to our byzantine and un-understandable to the average person structure of laws.

The 2 obvious holes I see here are..

For starters, the argument that the Dungeon Master “gives directions (like a prison gang leader)” to players is a big stretch. The DM (GM, Storyteller as I prefer to call them) is there to describe what is happening, as well as acting as an arbiter of the rules. I guess I could imagine seeing them using D&D as a talk around to give directions as to who needs a beating and who needs to be knocked off, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure that out real fast.

Secondly, even if the game did lead to some prison gang related activity.. so what? It’s not like the prisons curb that crap anyways, so they’ll just find another way around it to organize. If that’s the case that it happens, -then- you ban it locally. Otherwise it’s just another waste of time and money.

Thirdly, if you’re engrossed in D&D it’s probably pretty hard by definition to engage in gang activity. Role playing is really some entertainment and escapism (Which is prime time for certain at prisons) so I could imagine why it would be popular based off of that alone. Hell, maybe it would help with some rehabilitation as well..

Christian makes a very good point over at Destination unknown, regarding sandbox play. A truly unattached style of sandbox play can be very distant feeling and is difficult to make work well unless your players are very motivated to get out and do their thing. (This varies a lot with me, sometimes it does and doesn’t work well.) As gaming is hopefully about entertainment, in order to keep people interesting your game play styles need to vary. I typically use a semi sandbox style when playing and it usually has pretty good results.
Have general knowledge of areas and NPC’s – The idea here isn’t to setup a hard plot line, it’s knowing what the feeling of each area is and how major NPCs and even minor ones are going to react. This gives you a lot of working points for adventure hooks without having to be “on the tracks” per say,

Know your players – Each player typically has a style of play they most enjoy. If they’re all new to you, you’ll have to watch carefully and try and establish this. If not, you need to play to your players interests, at least a little bit. Running a romance story would be terrible if nobody was interested into it.. but if they were.. then it would be important to at least include a little bit of such and tie it into whats happening.

Know your characters – Likewise hard at the beginning, but by watching how they respond and knowing their backgrounds (since you hopefully helped in the building of them) you can have a pretty good idea of where the characters interests lie as well. This is helpful in throwing out adventure “hooks” as well.

Keep it Relevant – Assuming you know the above 2, keeping the game play relevant and interesting is pretty easy. In addition to simply throwing out hooks, you can also begin to throw the occasional hook “into” the player to give them and adventure that is “strongly suggested” to be followed. Which leads me into the next point..

A little bit of railroading is ok – I hate being “on the tracks” as much as anyone, but as soon as the gameplay becomes truely important to both the character and the player it’s ok to railroad a little bit. Often, it will be self imposed at that point if the mission or adventure in question involves a family member, loved one or other friend. The key is not to do that all the time or make it a long chain of events in some grandiose arc.

With these strategies, it’s a pretty good opportunity to expand your normal gameplay style, or focus your style in if it’s a bit too distant.

This is a project that has been finished for a little while now, but it had some finalizing details to get everything put together and make it work well. Overall time on it was about 3 months, and we took around 3 days filming it. I think our end results turned out very well for having a budget of precisely zero dollars to put this together. Filming was done on a SLR camera, in 720p resolution.

The overall goal was to put together a small promotional video for the Doro I train at in the Detroit area, the Martial Science Center. The Iaido group here is Takumakan and specifically is Toyama Ryu or for those that aren’t in the know… the style taught to Japanese military officers.

There is probably one in the future coming for Jujitsu, but I hope it’s not too soon as this really took some effort.